Joecities

Caught up on some reading today. Here's an interesting one from the BBC :

According to the Federal Trade Commission, 9.9 million Americans have been the victims of identity theft at an average cost per person of $5,000 (£2,700)

Let's round it off to 10m. At $5k each. That's 50bn dollars lost to identity theft ?! Man ! If that's not a market waiting to be tapped, I don't know what is.

And in Wired :

More than 100,000 customers of Wachovia and Bank of America have been notified that their financial records may have been stolen by bank employees and sold to collection agencies.

I guess the crims are faster than the cops in this instance. Would be interesting to see whether in the long run, security (or the lack of it) becomes so overwhelming that the whole online security thing breaks down, or whether some form of unbreakable security becomes a new standard.